Two closely related ICT tactics will become even more prevalent – cost reduction, and consolidation or centralisation of servers, which includes the strategies of scale-out or scale-up.

Scale-out seems to be the more popular of the two strategies and centres on harnessing the combined processing power, flexibility and increased fault-tolerance of multiple smaller, commodity servers. Scale-up is the more traditional approach, centring on building very high-end and powerful capabilities into a single server.